Agency pitches and user experience design

Nov 9, 2009
• dug

A nice man called David tweeted me once with a link to a video of Russell Davies talking about interestingness, size and creativity. In the video, Russell refers to a project I did a couple of years ago for Birdseye. I just wanted to thank David as it’s always nice to know there are people out there who share the passions I get out of bed for:-)

I’ve been thinking about advertising agencies big and small, partly because of the LGFE reunion, and partly because I’m pretty much always stuck in the thick of one or other user-centred design process debate.

At the time, I sent the following question to a recruiter as we were talking about maybe working together. I still don’t know the answer, but I’m pretty sure it’s tough for a passionate user experience person to work without discovery…

Here was the question I had in mind:

80% of the magic of user-centered design happens in the discovery phase, prior to the IA proposing the information model for an interface. As most pitches involve going to the client with a ready-made proposal, agencies tend to find it difficult to produce user-centered design. Does your agency have a strategy in place to overcome this challenge?